Raspberry Pi Pico – Pico

by Raspberry Pi

A low cost, high-performance microcontroller board built around Raspberry Pi's very own chip - the RP2040.

Raspberry Pi Pico is Raspberry Pi's first microcontroller board, designed especially for physical computing. Microcontrollers are a different type of device than Single Board Computers (like the Raspberry Pi 4 and previous generations of Pi), they don't run an operating system and they are typically programmed to do just one task - though that task can be pretty intricate and exciting! They're perfect for experimenting with hardware and using as the brains of custom devices, machines and inventions.

It can be easily reprogrammed over USB from a Raspberry Pi or other computer using the C/C++ SDK or the official MicroPython port. The landing page is the best place to get started, or scroll down for links to the technical documentation for both the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board and the RP2040 microcontroller chip.

Raspberry Pi Pico comes without header pins so you'll need to pick some up separately if you're planning on plugging your Pico into into a breadboard or one of our Raspberry Pi Pico add-ons. Alternatively you can buy an official Raspberry Pi Pico H, which comes with pre-soldered pin headers and a pre-soldered debug connector (3 pin JST-SH)

Board Specifications

Raspberry Pi Pico is a low-cost, high-performance microcontroller board with flexible digital interfaces, built on silicon designed at Raspberry Pi. Key features include:

  • RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the United Kingdom
  • Dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz
  • 264kB of SRAM, and 2MB of on-board Flash memory
  • Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards
  • USB 1.1 Host and Device support
  • Low-power sleep and dormant modes
  • Drag & drop programming using mass storage over USB
  • 26 multi-function GPIO pins
  • 2×SPI, 2×I2C, 2×UART, 3×12-bit ADC, 16×controllable PWM channels
  • Accurate clock and timer on-chip
  • Temperature sensor
  • Accelerated floating point libraries on-chip
  • 8×Programmable IO (PIO) state machines for custom peripheral support

Documentation

Documentation for the Raspberry Pi Pico board and the RP2040 microcontroller:

The API level Doxygen documentation for the Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ SDK is available as a micro-site.

Pinout

There's a handy interactive pinout for Raspberry Pi Pico at pico.pinout.xyz.